Re: Blockbusting news, results get worse

Jeff Garzik
2003-10-27T19:48:12Z

Hans Reiser wrote:
> Mudama, Eric wrote:
>
>>
>> or put it under heavy write workload and remove
>> power.
>>
> Can you tell us more about what really happens to disk drives when the
> power is cut while a block is being written? We engage in a lot of
> uninformed speculation, and it would be nice if someone who really knows
> told us....
>
> Do drives have enough capacitance under normal conditions to finish
> writing the block? Does ECC on the drive detect that the block was bad
> and so we don't need to detect it in the FS?

Does it really matter to speculate about this?

If you don't FLUSH CACHE, you have no guarantees your data is on the
platter.

Jeff